the way.  It is a novelty and an enormous relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost, or of all of them at once.  That freedom had not seemed possible to them.  They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea that the Christian God is the only thinkable God.  They had heard so much about that God and so little of any other.  With that release their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of God.

Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes.  This cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God.  It is the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in oneself.  It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin to oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in aim.  It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing side by side with and touching someone that we love very dearly and trust completely.  It is as if this being bridged a thousand misunderstandings and brought us into fellowship with a great multitude of other people. . . .

“Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”

The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and muse.  It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the battle.  There is no saying when it may not come to us. . . .  But after it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is no more doubt of God.  Thereafter one goes about the world like one who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and has found a solution.  One is assured that there is a Power that fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without.  There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and courage.

There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience, but under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has in this manner come into countless lives.  There is scarcely a faith, however mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to holiness.  God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error.  Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind.  But God is against the darkness in their eyes.  The faith which is returning to men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly.  It has little respect for mysteries.  It rends the veil of the temple in rags and tatters.  It has no superstitious fear of this huge friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little beings.  To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with him.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT